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Glastonbury 2017

But before anyone starts to panic, the creatures are not a risk to health.

Professor Richard Wall, a professor of Zoology at Bristol University, whose area of research is veterinary parasitology and ecology, said: "Rat tailed maggots live in stagnant water, and don't feed primarily on faeces. They have no impact on human health."

Our sister paper Somerset Live contacted local pest expert Justin Weaver who works for North Somerset Pest Force to see what he made of the videos.

He said: “Yes, it’s a rat-tailed maggot. They are aquatic flies, the larvae of hover flies, and are associated with sewage and stagnant water.”

The maggots become hover flies in later life - an altogether more attractive creature that looks a bit like a cross between a large wasp and a bee, and is a useful plant pollinator.

Could they get inside your body?

A paper in the American Society of Microbiology's Journal of Clinical Biology in 1999 said the maggots are rarely able to survive inside the human body (known as myiasis).

They normally arrive through contaminated water or uncooked food. But in highly exceptional cases they can get into the intestines through the anus.

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It said: "Most larvae are destroyed by the digestive juice, but others are able to live in the intestinal tract and produce intestinal distress. Moreover, the larvae can also exceptionally reach the intestinal tube through the anus (rectal myiasis).

"In urban areas of developed countries cases of intestinal myiasis are rare; most have occurred in countries where nutritional and sanitary conditions are unsatisfactory."

On the delicate subject of whether the maggots can get up one's bottom, Professor Wall said: "It's so vanishingly unlikely that you can discount it as a realistic possibility. Though that is not to say it isn't theoretically possible."

"One thing that happens, reasonably often, is that people look into the toilet bowl and see some big maggots and assume that these came out of them with the faeces, whereas in fact the maggots were tucked away under the toilet rim or somewhere similar."